Chapter 5 - Detective Hayes Enters
Within forty minutes, the curtain dividing my trauma bay was pulled back. A woman in a tailored charcoal blazer with an gold detective badge clipped to her belt entered the room, holding a slim leather notebook.
"Lee Morgan?" she asked. Her voice was sharp, measured, and devoid of nonsense. "I’m Detective Sarah Hayes, Major Crimes."
"Detective," I said, struggling to adjust my pillow. The nurse had just administered non-narcotic pain relief through my IV, easing the thumping pressure in my skull.
"Dr. Reynolds contacted our precinct directly," Detective Hayes said, pulling up a plastic chair and sitting beside the bed. "A blunt-force depressed skull fracture disguised as a party prank isn't a family dispute, Mr. Morgan. That’s attempted murder or aggravated battery at minimum. He told me you asked for law enforcement. What happened in that ballroom?"
I didn't hold back.
I told her about Grandma Evelyn’s missing four hundred thousand dollars. I told her about the shell company, Meridian Family Services, registered to a fraudulent mailbox. I told her about Aunt Marlene’s signature forgery while Grandma lay in post-op recovery from hip surgery. And I told her about Kendra’s cold whisper right before my face was smashed into the marble.
"They stole the physical thumb drives from my inside pocket while I was lying bleeding on the floor," I explained, my chest heaving. "Everyone was laughing. Garrett was filming it on his smartphone. They made it look like a hilarious blooper."
Detective Hayes was writing rapidly, her pencil scratching across the paper. "Do you have any backup evidence of these financial crimes, or did they get the only copies?"
"They got the flash drives," I said, a bitter, grim smile touching my split lips. "What Aunt Marlene and Kendra don't understand is that I've worked as a senior financial analyst for seven years. Nobody with a brain keeps primary evidence on unencrypted portable hardware without cloud redundancies."
I gave Detective Hayes the URL, the master security key, and the emergency recovery passphrase for my secondary server.
"Every wire transfer, every bank timestamp, every IP login from Marlene’s home address is secured in an immutable cloud vault," I told her. "And more importantly... check the country club’s independent cameras."
Detective Hayes sighed, tapping her pen against the notepad. "We dispatched a patrol unit to St. Clair ten minutes ago. The venue manager claims the ballroom cameras experienced an 'intermittent power glitch' during the cake cutting. The breaker for that circuit tripped."
My heart sank. "Marlene paid them off."
"Probably," Hayes conceded smoothly. "People with four hundred thousand dollars in stolen liquid assets have plenty of cash to grease palms. But they forgot one thing."
She leaned closer.
"In a room of sixty wealthy socialites, there are at least fifty private smartphones. And young people don't let a spectacle like that happen without posting it to their private feeds."
Right on cue, the curtain parted again.
Standing in the entryway, looking terrified, clutching a high-end digital SLR camera and a tablet, was Toby—my nineteen-year-old cousin, Grandma’s youngest grandson, and the only kid in the family who hated the Morgan family snobbery as much as I did.
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"Lee?" Toby stammered, his eyes wide at the sight of my stitched-up face and neck brace. "I... I think you need to see what I caught on my forty-frame-per-second continuous shutter."
***
